


Take Care

by Kari_Kurofai



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Monster Hunters, Monster of the Week, Mystery Machine - Freeform, Platonic Life Partners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 13:31:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5129474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kari_Kurofai/pseuds/Kari_Kurofai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don’t tell anyone. In hindsight, it makes Sam a little guilty. Not a lot, mind you. Just a little. After all that happened this past February (not to mention the one before that), it’s all together a bad idea for the two of them and their stupid dog to just vanish off the face of the planet without telling a soul. But then again, Sam is entirely sure she doesn’t want anyone to know what happened to them. It’s better this way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Care

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, after a year plus of utter silence, this is the trash I return with. I apologize for nothing and you're welcome.

_He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you._

**_Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146_ **

  


It starts with a car. Or more precisely, a van. 

A van that Mike fucking _hates_.

“Look at this,” he says, both arms held out towards the offending vehicle as if the gesture will make Sam drive it back to the hell from whence it came. “I said get a truck, Sam. A beautiful, lovely truck with a lockbox in the back and pimpin’ wheels and paint so shiny I can see my gorgeous face reflected on the hood. And you came back with _this_.” He gestures to the van again. “This kidnapper-white, faded, barely held together piece of shit! Stop laughing and look at it!”

Sam covers her mouth with a hand and does indeed take a look at the monstrosity she’s bought. It’s more or less everything Mike says it is. The white paint is peeling, the tread on the wheels is way too well worn, and there’s a crack in the windshield that spans from one wiper to the other. It’s really not the best. However, it was the best she could afford with the money they’d pooled together between them. And she tells him so. “Look, Mike, maybe if we had more than fifteen hundred dollars-”

“1,567,” Mike corrects.

“Okay . . . If we had more than 1,567 dollars,” Sam continues, “I could have bought us that over-compensating dream car of yours. But, alas, we’re broke college students and this is what we’ve got.” She circles around the van, admiring its flaws with a more artistic eye. “A fresh coat of paint, a new windshield, and some better tires will make this thing run just fine.”

Mike scowls and folds his arms over his chest, “Sam. It’s the fucking Mystery Machine. Nothing can make it better.”

Sam arches an eyebrow, “Can I be Daphne?”

“Wha- NO! That wasn’t supposed to be a compliment!” Mike stutters. “This van is trash, Sam! I don’t want us to be god damn Scooby gang! We’re supposed to be cool!”

“We have a van and a dog,” Sam shrugs a shoulder towards the aforementioned white dog sitting obediently to Mike’s right.

“Wolf,” Mike mutters, “He’s a wolf.”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Dog, wolf, doesn’t matter. He’s the Scoob, I’m Daphne because I’m awesome, and,” she points a finger at Mike, “You can be Fred.”

Jaw dropping, Mike gasps out an affronted, “But Fred’s the dumb one!”

“Exactly.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

They don’t tell anyone. In hindsight, it makes Sam a little guilty. Not a lot, mind you. Just a little. After all that happened this past February (not to mention the one before that), it’s all together a bad idea for the two of them and their stupid dog to just vanish off the face of the planet without telling a soul. But then again, Sam is entirely sure she doesn’t want anyone to know what happened to them. It’s better this way, because in the long run she knows it’ll just hurt them all more. 

It’s better that Chris thinks about them with a bottle of beer in one hand and his laptop propped open beneath the other, fingers flying away down the pages of his newest script. Sam’s sure she’s in them somehow, the way writers always insert little bits of those they love in their words. She’ll see the way she ties her hair up one day, or her favorite pair of shoes another, pieces of a life long gone. He sends the word docs to Sam’s now unused email, and she reads them without replying. 

It’s better that Ashley stay optimistic. When anyone asks, she will tell them that Sam and Mike are off having grand adventures. On Monday, they’re in New York, and by Friday, they’re in Peru. Through Ashley’s eyes, Sam gets to see the whole world and then some.

It’s better that Jessica never see them again, in all honesty. Sam tries not to remember the final time she and Mike visited her, the fact that she was the last person they saw before they left. She tries not to remember the way one minute, Jessica had been talking and laughing with them and the next, she’d had her head in her hands, shuddering, shaking breaths wracking her body while Mike tried his best to calm her down. “Breathe, just breathe,” he’d told her, voice soft but his eyes wide. “Come on, Jess, count with me. Let’s count breaths. In, one . . . Out, two . . . In, three . . .” It had taken far too long, and by the time Jessica was smiling and laughing again, Mike’s gaze didn’t hold a spark in it any longer, and he glanced at Sam with nothing but grief and guilt behind his strained smirk. She fears he’ll spend the rest of his life whispering, “If I’d just been faster, I could have . . .”

It’s better if Matt stays with Jessica. He got her out, after all, Mike tells Sam when the only thing visible on the road is the white lines, black asphalt, and the glare of their headlights. Matt did what he couldn’t and then some. Matt brought her home. Matt knows how to help he breathe when she remembers too much. Sam reminds him that Matt is shooting for a medical degree, so that’s sort of to be expected. Mike just shakes his head and continues driving, most days. Others though, when Sam’s at the wheel and Wolfie has his head in Mike’s lap, Mike just mutters, “Anyone can get a medical degree. I could totally be a doctor, too. I’m thinking . . . Gynecologist. You want to help me study?” And Sam hits him with the road map.

It’s better if Emily forgets about them, never speaks of them to anyone, except maybe herself. She switches schools a few times, Sam knows, slides between various degrees with her stellar grades to back up her poor life choices until she’s sitting hundreds of miles from anyone who was at Blackwood Mountain with a dozen half-finished degrees surrounding her. One day she’ll graduate, Sam is sure of that. She’ll get a job, spend money, get married, and pretend the snow doesn’t send unnatural shivers down her spine every winter. And if they pass each other by in the far flung future, Sam knows that Emily won’t spare her a glance. She’s fine with that.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

So they disappear. Hell, they don’t even properly drop out of college. The road opens up before them at the same time the university doors close behind them. They paint the van a light, forest-y shade of green that Mike says is just a few turns of the color wheel from Mystery Machine teal. It reminds Sam of the color of sad eyes and missed opportunities. In the back they store three sleeping bags, two spare tires, and a large metal lock-box that’s never actually locked so long as they’re within eyesight of the car. 

Mike checks the contents of the box almost hourly so long as he’s not driving. He sharpens knives and machete’s at rest stops, oblivious to the nervous stares of any fellow travelers passing by. While on the road, he spins empty gun cylinders, rolls bullets across the palms of his hands, and cleans barrels with thin brushes. It’s soothing, Sam discovers, to watch him out of the corners of her eyes, listen to the thin metal scraping and clicking of the parts while Mike works. It reminds her why they’re here rather than in cramped classroom desks, and it makes her feel safe, like the monsters are only in her mind and not out in the world ahead with dripping fangs and beating hearts.

Many nights find them sleeping in the van. Another reason it was a more responsible purchase than a truck, Sam reminds Mike frequently. “We’d be so cold in a truck bed,” she explains to him when they press back to back in the darkness. Mike just snorts and tucks one arm under his head, the other thrown over Wolfie’s back. “Out in the wilderness,” Sam continues undeterred, “At the mercy of all the snow and wind and rain-”

“Yes, yes, we get it. Sam is a genius for buying the Mystery Machine,” Mike huffs. Wolfie gives an agreeing little wuff of his own, though much less sarcastic. Sam laughs. “It’s so practical, so perfect with it’s four walls and curtained windows that totally don’t make it look like a 70’s shaggin’ waggin.”

“You’re just mad that I’m smarter than you,” Sam grins.

“If I were in the back of a truck, I could look at the stars instead of listen to you pat yourself on the back.”

“I’ll buy some those glow-in-the-dark sticker stars for you and put them on the ceiling,” Sam promises.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Six out of ten times, Sam finds the jobs. Mike scours the internet on his tablet over breakfast at that morning’s diner, and Sam picks up the local newspaper from the rack by the door when they walk in. She’s told him a hundred times that the sort of things they’re looking for won’t make enough of a splash in the media to be easily found on the internet, but he doesn’t listen. Sometimes he brings in bigger jobs, granted, messes that take them weeks to clean up fully. But most of the time it’s Sam who slides the newspaper across the table to the right of Mike’s stack of whip-cream laden pancakes with a quiet, “This looks up our alley.” 

Mike always raises a nonchalant eyebrow and continues eating as if he’s not scouring the article she indicates with a critical eye. He’s just as good as she is at picking out the words that hint towards their area of expertise, if not better. He plucks the pen he keeps tucked behind his ear these days up and circles them, as well as some things Sam missed. _Missing_. _No Trace_. _Eye Witness_. _Creature_. He makes marks around the descriptions of footprints on that week’s lead, pushing the paper back to Sam’s side of the table so she can reread what he’s pointed out.

“Bear tracks and human footprints,” she says aloud. “So? The thing, which probably isn’t a bear, obviously took the girl in question. I don’t get why I should be concerned about human footprints.”

“Most girls going hiking tend to wear boots,” Mike says casually around a mouthful of pancakes. Sam wishes he’d wait until he finished chewing, just once. “I’m pretty sure the implication here is that they were bare footprints.”

Sam inwardly curses at not thinking of that, and begins making the calls to the local wildlife center that discovered the tracks. Mike’s right, of course, and within the hour they have the plaster casts of the things spread out on a table at the center. Mike keeps the on-staff rangers distracted while Sam studies the casts and runs some queries through a cryptozoology forum she’s been lurking on. Both the bear tracks and the human ones have a broken fourth toe on the left side, and Sam takes pictures of them before she closes her laptop and hustles Mike out of the center with a brief thank you to the rangers.

Wolfie greets them with a bark out the open driver’s side window when they reach the van, and Mike pats him fondly on the head before he leans against the door and waits for Sam to spring her theories on him. They press shoulder to shoulder with Sam’s laptop balanced between her right arm and his left. “Skinwalker,” he reads from the forum page she’s pulled up. “Why is it always Native shit?”

“They were here first,” Sam shrugs. “They’ve had more time to release their hellions on the land. If we were in Europe, we’d probably be fighting vampires.”

Mike shoots her a toothy smile, “If we go a bit further south we can fight vampires. Get some passports, cross the border, chill in Forks and wait until some high school students start sparkling.”

Sam punches him the arm.

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

The worst thing about skinwalkers is that they can look human. And not just look human, _be human_. Or at least, used to be human. A lot of the things they fight used to be human. Sam finds the missing girl, or at least the creature wearing her skin. She answers all the questions about her past that Sam throws at her correctly and expertly, so Sam doesn’t question it, not until she’s split up from Mike to take the girl back to the road and the safety of the van. And Mike’s not alone, he has Wolfie, it’s all fine.

Or at least it us until Sam catches the girl’s eyes in the beam of her flashlight and sees them reflect it right back at her. It’s brief, just a quick flicker that makes every muscle in Sam’s body tense. The girl must sense the shift of realization despite Sam’s efforts to stay calm as she stealthily tries to reach for the gun at her hip, because one second she’s human, and the next she’s . . . not.

The prints they’d looked at were that of a bear, but Sam’s not quite sure what the monster that stands before her is at bursts from its human shell and rears up in her face with an earth-shattering roar. Its eyes are large, bulbous and white without pupils, and its paws are massive even for a bear, claws serrated like knife edges. Its fur is patchy, grey and clinging to skin and grotesquely visible bones in clumps. And its mouth, god, it’s too human. It grins at Sam with pointed teeth and dripping saliva, the roar morphing into an eerie, high-pitched laugh as the smell of ozone seeps into the air around them.

Sam’s learned long ago to shoot first and question that decision later. This time, like most others, it probably saves her life. She aims for one of the milky eyeballs and fires, scrambling backwards as the thing howls in pain. It staggers, and Sam takes the time to make a mad dash for the van that’s only a little further down the trail. 

She doesn’t make it far. The thing’s laughter, a sound that distinctly reminds her of a dog trying to imitate human sounds, chases her through the trees until one of those malformed paws knocks her flying into the undergrowth. Sam curses as she lands, careful to cover her head as she skids across the dirt and wet leaves to an agonizing stop. Her arm is bleeding, large claw marks goring through her coat and shirt down to the skin. Instinct makes her stay down, slow her breathing and wait as high-pitched giggles and thundering footsteps draw nearer. 

The monster’s left eye is destroyed, a gaping wound all that’s left where it once bulged from its grotesque face. It lets out a few more hiccupping laughs as it spots Sam crouched on the ground, blood dripping from her arm, it’s too-human mouth splitting its face into a gleeful grin. Sam stays down as it rises onto its hind paws again, ready to crash its full weight upon her and crush her ribs and lungs beneath its claws. She waits until it throws itself forward before she shoots again.

The first shot hits it in the throat, cutting off that hideous laugh mid-breath. The second, third, and fourth leave one of its paws dangling from the rest of the limb, exposing bone and muscle that struggle to stay together under the onslaught. The fifth goes up through the behemoth’s open mouth and rockets out the back of its skull. It stops, wobbling for a moment that Sam takes to roll quickly out of the way before it falls heavily to the ground face-first.

Sam listens to its breathing slow and finally halt before she hauls herself to her feet, injured arm tucked gingerly against her chest. In the cold clutches of death the creature has returned to its human form, and Sam tries not to gag and fails. She braces herself against a tree, facing away from the scene as she empties the contents of her stomach on its roots. She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t thought she’d see the death blows she’d inflicted mirrored onto the body of that young girl they’d spent the night trying to save. She forgot, just for a while, that that creature grew up human. 

Pulling herself together, she strips the corpse of its coat, using her pocket knife to rip into strips she can tie around the gashes on her arm. Then, she gathers stones from the ground and makes her way back to the trail, stacking them along the side of the dirt path to mark the location of her kill. She’ll burn the body later, but for now she has more important stuff to take care of. Namely, finding Mike.

God damn it, why do they always think it’s a good idea to split up? Yeah, it’s worked a few times, but it’s gone horribly wrong just as often as it hasn’t. She backtracks up the trail as fast as she can, reloading her handgun as she goes. If there were trouble, real honest to god trouble, Wolfie would have howled by now. Assuming the other skinwalker wasn’t smart enough to take him out before going for Mike. Still, her heart rate only picks up the further she goes, the nausea of fear forming a lump in her throat.

She must walk a good mile and a half before she sees any sign of them, and when she does she almost collapses in relief. Mike’s standing over another too-human body, Wolfie at his side, tail wagging as Mike wipes blood off his machete and onto his jeans. He looks up when Sam stumbles and leans heavily against a tree, every muscle in her being suddenly feeling too heavy for her bones. 

“Shit,” Mike curses, immediately abandoning his kill in favor of rushing to Sam’s side. He grabs her by the arms first, then retracts his grip when she winces and his hand comes away painted with crimson. “Fuck! Sam-”

“I’m fine,” she promises. “A little light-headed, but fine.”

“Jesus,” Mike hisses as he takes a closer look at the damage. “Those are seriously deep, Sam, we need to get you stitched up.” 

She shakes her head. “Later. We need to burn the bodies before sunrise.”

He blinks, eyes narrowing before a frown of realization mars his features. “The girl . . .”

“Yeah. Hopefully it’s not contagious.” Sam shrugs her injured arm and smiles in the face of Mike’s alarmed look. “Don’t worry, I don’t think it is. Wikipedia said something about needing to wear an animal pelt, not getting scratched.”

Mike lets out a strained sounding breath. “Fine. But let’s hurry it up. I don’t need you passing out. You’re heavier than you look and I am not carrying your ass down this mountain.”

It’s all talk, of course, because the next morning Sam finds herself tucked up safely in her sleeping bag in the back of the van, Wolfie’s head on her chest and her arm stitched up and cleaned. Mike glances back from the drivers seat when she calls his name, unspoken relief in the corners of his eyes as he pulls over to the side of the road and leans back to check on her. “You’re buying me dinner,” he scolds.

“If I’m buying, we’re going to eat somewhere with veggie burgers.”

“Ugh.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Mike says he likes the fight the best, that the thrill of the hunt and the endless war they’ve enlisted themselves into is his reason for living. Sam knows he’s lying. Sure, that’s part of it. That’s why they left, why they’re chasing stories cross country. They couldn’t let go of the horrors they saw and the idea that out there, somewhere, there were other people who were scared, hurt, dying while they waited for salvation the way their own friends had been. So yeah, that’s part of it. But it’s not what Mike likes best, that Sam knows for certain.

It’s the road that Mike loves, the thrum of the van’s wheels on blacktopped back roads. He relishes in the air whipping past open windows on warm afternoons and cool nights, in the feel of the steering wheel under his hands when he drives. He likes the passenger seat too, his fingers and palms tapping out a beat in time to the music on the radio while Sam drives, and when they can’t get a good signal he makes up his own tunes. He’s not tone deaf, but he’s no rock star either, so Sam usually listens with the odd emotion of annoyed fondness in her chest. Sometimes, he can get Wolfie to howl along.

The first few months, Mike is absolutely crap at reading the map. They can’t rely on GPS when they stay on the road for so long, can’t risk wasting the van’s battery on charging their phones all day when they can just use the old fashioned method. They once get lost for three days without sight of civilization before Mike realizes he’s been holding the map upside down the whole time. To Sam’s credit, she doesn’t strangle him. She certainly thinks about it, especially when he starts laughing so hard at the murderous expression on her face that he can’t even sit up in his seat properly. 

Sam loves the road, too, but that’s not her favorite part. She’d always planned on escaping from society in some capacity, letting nature beckon her away from the suburbs of her childhood eventually. Maybe this isn’t what she had in mind, but she’s content with it anyways. She loves sandwich breaks on the hood of the van, pulled over to the of the road with nothing between the earth and the sky but trees and themselves. And yeah, she keeps an eye on the shadows, always, glances to the tree line between bites with a wary eye, but still. 

And there’s something homey about the van, too, something she never quite found in her parents arms, or her dorm room, or even in the depths of those forest-green eyes as their owner had brushed her hair from her face and told her what she had once thought were all his darkest secrets. Sam finds home behind the steering wheel with one arm hanging out the window. She finds it in the passenger seat, her hand on the radio dial as she tries to drown out Mike’s impromptu karaoke session and simultaneously stifle her laughs. Home is the motion of her arm as she throws a worn tennis ball across the rest stop to the tune of Wolfie’s excited barks. It exists in the glow-in-the-dark stars she sticks to the roof of the van in recognizable constellations, and the sound of Mike’s surprised chuckle as he notices them the first night, his back shaking against hers through the fabric of their sleeping bags until it becomes contagious and they’re both wheezing, tears prickling the corners of their eyes while Wolfie looks on, clearly concerned for their mental health. 

Home is the satisfaction she feels when she returns daughters to their mothers, sons to their fathers, and lifts just a little bit more guilt from her heart.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Sometimes they fight. It doesn’t always start about the same thing, but it always ends with a similar conclusion. Once, Mike gets mad at how much extra money they spend to maintain Sam’s vegetarian diet. Another time, she gets mad at him for not separating their laundry correctly and turning all of her whites pink with one of his red socks. Why the hell does he even have red socks? They fight about jobs, which ones to take and what sacrifices they’ll have make and all the ways it could, did go wrong by the end of every long day. 

But always, always they fight about that night. It’s the end all, be all, underlying rift between them, though neither of them bring it up explicitly. Not in so many words at least. Sam tries not to blame him, after all this time and everything he’s done to make up for it, she really does. Especially because it wasn’t just him in on it, he wasn’t the one with the camera in his hand, or the one hiding under the bed. He wasn't the one who laughed first. Regardless, that old, simmering anger rears up in her when things get bad. That guilt in her own chest pushing all the blame onto him just so she’ll stop blaming herself.

One night, they fight because Wolfie hasn’t had a bath in awhile, and Sam insists she can’t fall asleep because of the smell. As with a lot of their fights, it quickly turns into an all out screaming match. 

“Just take care of your dog!” Sam yells. “Is that so hard, Mike? Taking care of things? Being a nice person? I’m sure Wolfie would appreciate it!”

“Our dog!” Mike throws back in her face. “He’s just as much yours at this point as he is mine! I hosed him down at that gas station last week! It’s your turn! Maybe if you’d do something once in awhile, pick up the reigns and not just stand by and wait for things to fix themselves we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”

“I didn’t stand by!” Sam tries to keep the lump out of her throat, the tremor from her voice, and fails miserably. “I thought everything would be fine!” She swings without even thinking, long held back anguish and regret and rage fueling the motion as it collides solidly with Mike’s chest. He doesn’t stop her. He just sits there, sleeping bag pooled around his waist and his arms held stiffly at his sides. She thinks, as she brings her other hand up to follow the first and dig her knuckles into his sternum, that he wants her to hit him. “You’re the one who was an insensitive, selfish, asshole! If you’d just given your own stupidity a little thought we wouldn’t even be here!”

She raises her fists again, and this time Mike does stop her. He catches her by the wrists before she can make contact, uses the momentum she already had going to tug her forward and close the few feet between them until they’re nose to nose. His eyes are dark, furious, though Sam can’t tell if who he’s angry at, her, or himself. “I know that,” he says, breath hot against her lips, not touching but far too close all the same. “You think I don’t fucking know that, Sam? That this is all my fault? That if I’d just thought things through we’d both have college degrees right now? That Hannah and Beth would be posting stupid sorority pictures on their Facebook walls tonight? That Josh and Chris would be the next big Youtube sensations and we could say ‘Hey, we grew up with those idiots’? You think I don’t fucking wake up every morning reminding myself that if I’d only been less of an asshole, Jess wouldn’t have PTSD at a level only soldiers should have? That I would never have had to stare down the barrel of a gun and decide whether I should kill my ex-girlfriend or not? YOU THINK I DON’T FUCKING KNOW THAT?!”

Sam flinches, struggles in his grip until he releases her and lets her collapse, sobbing onto the folds of her sleeping bag. The unabated guilt in his voice, his eyes, that had mirrored her own makes her whole frame shake. They’re running, she knows that now, running from the mistakes they can’t fix, the failings they can’t escape. And god, she’s just glad she isn’t running alone. “I should have followed them,” she hiccups. 

“You’d be dead too,” Mike whispers. There isn’t a hint of doubt in his voice, and Sam knows full well that what he says is true. She doesn’t say that might be better, but she thinks it. And in the silence that falls between them, she wonders if Mike thinks it, too.

“I need you here,” he says suddenly, and Sam stills, stops breathing. “I couldn’t do this alone, and god knows I’d have been fucking shredded by the Wendigos that night if you hadn’t been there. At the very least, you’re the official savior of my butt, so that’s something.”

She chokes out a laugh, face still pressed into her sleeping bag. “Gee, thanks.”

“Really,” he continues, and Sam can hear the wavering smile in his tone. “I’d be lost without you, Samantha.”

“Michael Munroe, don’t even,” Sam warns.

“You are my shining light, Samantha,” Mike coos, “My lovely, monster-hunting, badass bitch that knows how to read maps and steal all the best bites of my pancakes.”

Sam rolls over so she can face him, and is mildly startled to find Mike laying across his own sleeping bag to her left, propped up on one elbow and already looking at her. He has one hand on his chest, and Sam frowns, wondering if she’d really punched him that hard. “I’m sorry,” she says, the words falling out of her mouth before she can give them any further thought.

Mike smiles, “Yeah. Me too. Just be aware that that is the one and only time I’m going to let you hit me. Next time I will drop kick you into the sun.”

“You will not.”

“Will so. Violently and without hesitation.” He pulls the arm from his chest and uses it to shield his eyes from the non-existent sun. “There goes Sam, vegetarian of my heart. She punched me in the boob hard enough to bruise, and now she’s gone.”

Sam reaches for him on instinct, fingers catching in the collar of his shirt and tugging the fabric down. She doesn’t miss the way his breath stutters near her ear as she leans into his space. “You big baby, I don’t see any bruise.”

“I mean, you could probably see it better if you actually took my shirt off.” The statement is teasing in its air, but Sam can hear the slight uncertainty beneath it, the reality.

She lets go, rolls over, and zips herself into the safety of her sleeping bag without a second thought. “You’ll get cold,” she mutters. 

Mike lets out a strained sigh. “Probably,” he admits. 

Sam listens to him shift around, get situated in his own, separate sleeping bag until his back is pressed against hers in the same position they always fall asleep in. She counts his breaths as she begins to drift off, his heartbeats that echo through the fabric and into her own ribs. She’s almost asleep when he rolls over and throws an arm over her waist. 

“Mike-”

“I’m cold even with a shirt on,” he murmurs against her shoulder. 

“ . . . You’re going to wash the dog in the morning, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

The first thing that Mike says about the Stikini they’re hunting is, “What the _actual fuck_ is it doing this far north! It’s from Florida!”

The fifth thing he says about it is, “Oh, gross, it vomits up its own organs? I don’t want to see that.”

The thirty-fourth thing he says about it goes something along the lines of, “I told you I didn’t want to see that!”

And the final thing he says about the Stikini is, “Stikini, more like stinky! Jesus Mary Ann Joseph your breath reeks, lady! You know the toothbrush was invented, righ-” His words cut off in a scream, and Sam hauls ass like she’s never hauled ass before towards the sound, the air in her lungs raking through her like fire as she breaks down the door of the hunting cabin they’d cornered the witch in with her shoulder. Mike’s on the floor, his back arching off the wood and his hands held over his head in the talon-like grip of the witch. He’s still screaming, his eyes rolling back into his skull as the owl-eyed creature digs its teeth into his chest. And Sam can see it, see his skin being stripped from him, see his ribs beneath the blood as the witch tries to tear its way through his flesh and to his heart. 

Sam hesitates, her own terror freezing her in place. _He’s dying_. She can _see it_. Mike is _dying_. 

Mike screams again, but this time its tangible. It has consonants and vowels and a discernable sound. “Sam!”

She shoots. She knows it won’t do any good, but she does it anyways. She aims between the witch’s eyes and fires over and over until it staggers and falls away from Mike, and instead lunges at her. 

The shriek the thing lets out is unearthly, and were Sam a lesser woman it might have brought her to her knees. Instead, it just fuels her adrenaline, keeps her feet moving as she races back into the darkness, leading the witch away from the hunting cabin, away from Mike.

The only way to kill the cursed thing is to destroy the organs it deposited before it transformed for the night, but Sam has no idea where those are. She doesn’t have time to find them now. She’d been searching, of course, hoping they were nearby while Mike distracted the creature. But that plan has flown out the window. Now, she just needs to keep it moving, keep it away from Mike until it takes its human form at dawn.

God damn it, why is it always dawn.

Sam zigzags through the trees, leaps creeks and scrambles up boulders, always just a hair’s breadth out of the Stikini’s reach. It rakes its feathered talons over her back just once, and she shoots it in the face again, sends it reeling back and gives herself enough time to surge ahead once more. 

Eventually, she finds a road. A highway, to be exact, and stops to breathe in the middle of the dark asphalt, chest heaving and legs shaking. The Stikini screeches in the trees behind her, and she stumbles to the other side of the road and into the undergrowth, sure her legs are going to give out at any second. Either that, or her heart that’s hammering in her chest, too fast, too heavy for the grief that wells in her eyes as she thinks about what she’s left behind. 

The witch careens out into the road, and Sam watches, ready for it to take her to and end this fucked up, hellhole of a story when its eyes flash, the glow of headlights illuminating its owlish features for a moment before a car bumps unceremoniously over its body and skids to a halt further down.

Sam crouches lower along the roadside as a couple gets out, yelling and trying to figure out what the hell they just hit. The thing isn’t moving from its twisted up position in the tires, bumper, and underside of the car. Technically, she’d be quite shocked if it did, considering it's in literal pieces, with the majority of it now existing as a red, feathered skid mark on the blacktop. 

Thank god for modern technology, she supposes. 

Her breathing slows as she waits for the couple to move on and drive off, deciding it must have been a really sick, really weird looking bird. Eventually, Sam moves from her hiding spot, and begins the slow process of following the road back towards where she think she parked the van. 

She finds it, after what seems like hours, and Wolfie greets her with a whine when she throws the back doors open. They’d left him here, uncertain of the extent of the owl-witch’s magic and how it would affect their non human companion. “He’s not here, boy,” she says with a pat to his head while she digs beneath the sleeping bags for the first aide kit. “I’m going to get him. Stay here. Don’t . . .” She swallows. “Don’t worry.”

It takes her another hour at least to find the hunting cabin again, all on top of the long chase through the woods that had brought her to the Stikini’s demise in the first place. The door is still hanging on its hinges when she stumbles through it, but Mike isn’t lying where she left him. There’s a streak of blood on the floorboards, and Sam stands over it for a breathless minute before glancing around. Did he crawl away? Or was he taken? Had she left him alone only for his heart to get gobbled up by another witch? 

Faint drops of blood lead her to a second room where a crimson hand print has been left on the empty door frame. That’s where she finds him, his back against the far corner of what was probably once a bedroom. Were his eyes open, he’d be facing the door, able to see any intruders that might be trying to sneak up on him. But they aren’t open, and his head is lolling against his collar, his hands stained with his own blood limp in his lap and clutching the remains of his coat, now slick with red where he must have been pressing it to his chest.

Sam falls to his side, fingers flying to his neck to find the barely-there pulse with a sob of relief. “Mike,” she whispers as she empties the first aide kit and begins pressing gauze to the still oozing tear in his skin. “Mike, we’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

“Big promises for such a little girl,” Mike slurs, eyes still shut.

A startled laugh escapes her, high and real and breathless. “Oh thank god. Oh thank fucking god, Mike, I thought-”

“Nah,” he murmurs. “I’m too cute to die.”

“Stop talking, you’re going to make yourself pass out,” Sam scolds. 

Mike lifts his head, it takes some visible effort but he does it. “I was trying to think of some line about how there’s no way I’d let some stinky owl-witch rip my heart out, because that’s your job, but I couldn’t make it sound romantic enough.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely not romantic at all. Also, shut up, I have to call 911 now before you bleed out.”

“Only for you, babe.”

“Stop.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Of course they’re on the news a little bit, brief reports that don’t show their faces, random couple gets attacked by, well . . . Something. Probably a bear. Most news stations that feel it’s interesting enough to report on at all seem to decide it was a bear. Anyways, the point is that despite giving everyone fake names, fake histories, and even fake IDs, somehow, someway, Chris shows up at Mike’s hospital room on the third day with flowers and, ironically, a stuffed bear.

“What the fuck,” Mike says blearily from his bed. He’s on a lot of pain meds, Sam loves it. “Where are your glasses, bro?”

Chris laughs. “Contacts, Mikey.” He tosses the flowers on the bed, and the teddy bear at Sam, who proceeds to unceremoniously hand it to Wolfie, their falsely certified therapy dog. 

Mike picks up the flowers and gives them an over dramatic sniff. “Aw, for me? You’re the best boyfriend ever. Anyways,” he puts the flowers very pointedly on the top of his heart monitor, “Tell me how you found us so I can make sure it never happens again.”

Chris, to his credit, doesn’t flinch. He just pulls up a chair on the opposite side of Mike’s bed from where Sam sits. “You say that as if I lost track of you in the first place,” he says. “You’re definitely not easy to find, but you’re not hard, either, if someone knows where to look.”

“Does everyone know?” Sam asks.

Shaking his head, Chris laughs. “No, none of them have time for that. They all have real jobs. No,” he leans back in his chair until the front feet of it are no longer touching the floor, “It’s just me. The sad, lonely writer nerd who has nothing better to do with his time.”

Mike snorts, “You have your second film premiering at Sundance in two weeks, and your first was successfully crowd funded on the internet to noticeable success. You’re hardly sad. A nerd, yes. Always. But a nerd who has fairly well lined pockets and more than enough to keep him occupied.”

Chris looks astonished, and Sam admires the flustered blush that lights his cheeks. “You, you guys know about that?”

“We keep up well enough,” Sam says. 

“Blah blah blah, we’re proud of you and all that jazz,” Mike says. “But seriously, dude, how did you find us?”

Chris shrugs. “You’ve been hunting monsters, right? That’s what you guys do now, isn’t it? I can read a newspaper, you know, and I know how to use the internet, thank you very fucking much.” Mike narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Uh . . . I also frequent the same crypto zoology forum Sam sometimes uses to figure out the identity of the monster-of-the-week you guys are on the trail of.” He quirks a smile, “MysteryMachine121394? Yeah, that was so hard to figure out. You think I don’t remember Josh’s birthday, Sam?”

This time, it’s Sam who blushes, and she fiddles with the strings of her hoodie as Mike turns his unfocused, scrutinizing gaze on her. “Later,” she warns him, and he thankfully returns his attention to Chris. 

“So when there was a news report of a young couple getting mauled by a bear in the woods a few provinces over,” Chris goes on, unperturbed by the interruption, “I figured this might be my only chance to actually see you guys, what with Mr. Duke Nukem over here in the hospital while the loving Mrs. Nukem stayed at his bedside night and day.”

Mike barks out a laugh. “Holy shit, Sammy, you used the Nukem IDs?”

“They were the only ones still in date,” Sam snaps. “Shut up.”

Mike continues to laugh, clutching at his chest as with each shaky inhale. “Oh my god, priceless. Stop, it hurts to laugh this hard. Jesus Christ, I wish I had a camera right now so I could take a picture of your face and frame it. Holy shit. Mrs. Nukem. Did they say that on the news?” He grabs Chris’s arm, “Please tell me they called us Mr. and Mrs. Nukem on the news, oh my god.”

“They did.”

He howls, absolutely howls with glee while Sam buries her face in her hands. “I’m going to die,” Mike wheezes. “I’m sorry you had to save my sorry ass just for me to die from reopening my wounds with laughter, Sam. Oh my god, I can’t.”

Eventually, Mike dies down to a giggle, and a final snort before he sucks in a single, long, sigh of a breath and falls asleep with a resounding, content snore. “Strong stuff in there,” Chris remarks, his gaze on the IV bag hanging over Mike’s bed.

“Oh yeah.” Sam rests her elbows on the bed, fingers forming a steeple beneath her chin. “But enough about Mr. Nukem. Why are _you_ here, Chris?”

Chris lets his chair thunk flat on the tile floor again so he can look her in the eye fully. “What, a guy can’t just come by and see his injured friends?” She raises an eyebrow, and Chris swallows. “I did just want to see you, you know. I’ve missed you guys. Maybe everyone else hasn’t, but I have.”

Sam forces a smile, “I know. I’ve read your scripts you’ve been sending.”

“Yeah?” Chris’s eyes light up, the spark in them close enough to how it used to be that Sam almost lets the years fade away between them. Almost. Were it not for the silent, ghost of an elephant in the room, she’d probably be more welcoming. But she can’t, not when she knows why he’s here, not when he’s already subtly brought it up, drawn her attention to it with the mention of her forum handle. She can feel the spirit of forest-green eyes boring holes into her skin.

“They rebuilt the cabin,” Chris starts, sensing her unease, Sam thinks. “A family has been living there during the holidays for the past two years. Last week, their little girl went missing.”

Sam digs the heels of her palms into her eyes and lets her head fall down against the mattress, inches away from Mike’s hand. “Fuck.”

“Normally, I’d just expect you guys to eventually circle back around and take care of it, eventually. You usually do.” He smiles when she lifts her head to stare at him incredulously. “I told you I’ve been keeping track, Sam. Anyways, as I said, I was going to let you guys take care of it when you got around to it, god knows that kid is dead already. Probably didn’t last the night.” Sam winces, but Chris either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. “The thing is, when they went out looking for her on the third day, they found this.”

Chris holds out a closed hand and, reluctantly, Sam in turns holds out an open one. He drops the object in her palm, and Sam knows what it is before she even looks at it. She’s held it in her hand before, after all.

They’re both silent as she runs a nail over the fading W on the back of the watch, the name above it already worn smooth and unreadable over the years. Someone, or something else has been holding this watch, often, and probably making the same motion she is right now. That realization makes Sam drop it like she’s been burned.

“Sam . . .” Chris whispers, and the way he draws off, the thought that stays on the tip of his tongue, hangs heavy in the air. She knows. She knows what he’s going to say.

 _They left him there_. They left him there and he wasn’t . . . And he must have . . . He became . . .

She shakes her head, wills herself to suck in a shuddering breath and swallow down the lump in her throat. No, she doesn’t have time for this. She can regret and grieve and feel guilty about it later. She’s good at that. “I’ll do it.” She says. “As soon as Mike’s better, we’ll take care of it.” She’s careful to say _it_ in front of Chris, instead of _him_.

Chris sighs in relief. “Thank you.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

It’s a solid month before Mike can suck in a proper breath without wincing. The scar tissue is still fresh, still tight at the edges, but they can’t wait any longer, can’t stand the thought of leaving such a thing as this unfinished for even one day more.

They set off in the Mystery Machine with their map spread out on the dashboard, the route back towards Blackwood Mountain before them for the first time in almost five years. Sam does most of the driving this time, insisting that it isn’t because she wants Mike to rest, but rather because she herself feels restless. Honestly, it’s a little of both. Mike either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, and he settles back into his usual, literal rhythm of drum solos against the dashboard and sometimes-in-tune singing. He cleans his guns, sharpens his machete, and talks her ear off whenever he’s not sleeping, all as if its just another hunt, another job, and nothing more.

At night, it’s different. Sam sleeps restlessly the first night, plagued by nightmares of getting pulled under the water by long, thin hands, drowning as forest-green eyes stare her down while those hands turn to rip into her stomach and rend her in two. She wakes, gasping and clutching at herself where she knows she felt the hands impale her. 

“Shh, shh,” a hand, human and warm and real stills her own grasping fingers against her stomach through the fabric of her sleeping bag. “It was just a dream, Sam. It’s okay.”

Sam sucks in a breath, a second, a third, as she struggles to still her racing heart. Mike slips his other hand beneath her, tugging her closer to him as she realizes, belatedly, that he’s laying outside his sleeping bag, probably has been for awhile. Now that she thinks about it, she distinctly remembers a hand on her shoulder, jerking her awake. “Come on, Sammy,” he murmurs, “It’s just a job. Just another . . . Another monster we have to take care of.”

Slowly, slowly, her heart rate begins to steady itself, her breathing evens out, and she can focus her gaze on the glow-in-the-dark stars above them. “You know it isn’t,” she says finally, steadily. Mike hums a reluctant sound near the shell of her ear. “But yeah, we’re going to . . . Take care of . . . Of _him_. Like we should have. We’ll do better this time.”

Mike doesn’t reply, but his grip on her tightens, just a little. 

The confines of her sleeping bag suddenly seem suffocating, and Sam wiggles a little until Mike lets her go enough so that she can sit up. “Lets zip the sleeping bags together,” she says without preamble. 

“I- What?” Mike fumbles, sitting up as well. “Seriously?”

“If you’re going to question me, I’m going back to sleep.”

“No, no,” he waves his hands in front of his chest, “That’s not what I . . . Look, I meant that I wasn’t aware you can do that. With, uh, with sleeping bags. Like, for real, we could have been sharing one giant sleeping bag this whole fucking time? My mind,” he makes the gesture for an explosion on either side of his head, “totally blown.”

It’s a little difficult in the dark, with only Sam’s glow-in-the-dark constellations to shed any light, but they get the job done, somehow. It’s a little awkward, of course it is, to finish zipping their previously separate bags together and then look each other in the eye with the knowledge that they now have to both get into the newly formed single bag. Mike’s the one who laughs first, head tucked down as he shakes his head to the beat of his own mirth. “This is dumb. This is, like, really dumb.”

“Just get in,” Sam snickers. “I already know you’re dumb, you couldn’t even graduate college.”

Mike huffs but complies, crawling into the warm cocoon of fabric beside her. “Excuse you, it’s not like I failed school, I left. That’s totally different. And you didn’t graduate either, by the way.”

“I’m the smart one though, remember? We decided this ages ago. You’re Fred, I’m Daphne-”

“I was class president!”

“Any asshole can be president. Have you seen the government lately?”

“No, I’ve been too busy gutting monsters, thank you very much.”

At some point, he’d looped an arm around her and slipped a hand up the back of her shirt, fingers splaying out across the bare skin over her spine. Mike keeps his other arm pillowed under his head, eyes glazed over as he watches Sam tug down the collar of his shirt to expose the scarring over his chest. “Once again, I’d like to remind you that you could just, I don’t know, take it off. Here.” He props himself up on his elbows and reaches over his own shoulders to tug the aforementioned article over his head and off, tossing it across the van. A disgruntled snort lets them know it made contact with Wolfie, and Mike chuckles. “There, now you can look at these manly scars all you want.”

“Gee, a dream come true,” Sam deadpans. Regardless, she still takes him up on the invitation when he loops his arm over her again. She traces her nails over the biggest one, the newest one that spans nearly half his ribcage. A shiver runs through her as she remembers what it looked like before, remembers pressing her hands over it and trying to hold his life inside him until the rescue team could reach them. It’s still pink at the edges, and she can tells that it still hurts a little when she presses a little too hard and earns a wince. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mike murmurs.

She moves on to a scar on his shoulder, a puckered thing where a Kee-wakw had sunk its teeth. That had been their second hunt, back when they were still struggling to find their “groove,” as Mike had said when Sam cussed him out for being careless enough to get bitten. There were a lot of mistakes while they were learning, but that was by far the worst of them. A scar on his stomach stretches from navel towards his back in three long gashes, a gift from a Rugaru, with an identical, smaller set of lines spanning from chin to cheek on the left side of his face. 

Sam has scars too. They’re fewer, further between, but Mike finds the worst of them with ease. Like her, he’s probably memorized them, ingrained them into his mind as his fault the way she does with his. He rests a hand on the one the Skinwalker gifted her, and scratches a nail along a small mark set of marks on her back where an Atshen had dug its claws. 

They’re close now, close enough to breathe each other’s air, and their noses brush when Mike moves to tangle their legs together and presses his forehead to hers. “We can stop after this, you know,” he says suddenly, and Sam’s breath catches in her throat. “Once we . . . Once we finish this job, we can stop hunting, if you want.”

“Do _you_ want to?” she asks.

“No.” He sighs. “I like it here. The injuries not so much, but the good we do, I like that. And I like the road. I like the freedom of it.”

“The credit card fraud,” Sam says.

“The fake IDs, the shitty diner food,” Mike sing-songs in agreement. “We’re living the dream, Sammy.”

She pulls away a little, just enough so that she can properly look him in the eye. “Then why did you bring up quitting?”

Mike blinks, frowning. “Dunno. Just thought, maybe, once you wrapped up all your loose ends you’d want out. You’re the smart one after all. I question every day why you decided to go on this crazy road trip with me when I asked. To be honest, I was shocked that you did. That’s why I let you pick the car. I thought you were just humoring me.”

“Me laughing at your shitty jokes is humoring you,” Sam says. “Going along on this crazy adventure would be a bit far to be just humoring.”

“You don’t like my jokes?” Mike gasps.

Sam laughs.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

They find him exactly where they left him, in the cold, dark depths of the collapsed mines. The only reason Sam recognizes him at all is his eyes, which beneath the sightless white still maintain that soft, eternal green that reminded her of the stillness of the woods. His limbs are elongated, his body thin and gaunt to the bone. Every inch of his skin is almost translucently white from years without sunlight, and his teeth have extended beyond what his jaw can encompass. It’s horrible, worse than she could have imagined, and Sam can’t stop herself from shaking when she sees him crouched there in shadows. 

“Don’t move,” Mike hisses from her side, one hand on her arm, the other clutching his machete. Wolfie growls a similar warning at his heels.

Sam pries his fingers from her, gently, carefully, smiling against the sheer panic in Mike’s gaze, the plea that dies on his lips. “It’s okay,” she whispers, though she fears her trembling gives the lie away.

Mike doesn’t follow when she steps towards the Wendigo, he stays still and silent against the cave wall when the creature whirls on her, mouth opening to release one of the shrieks that’s haunted her dreams for years. Other than that, he doesn’t move, and Sam continues to approach him one shuddering step at a time. Some vestiges of clothes still cling to his deformed body, tattered wisps of a jumpsuit hang about his shoulders and neck. “Hey,” Sam says as she steps closer, closer still. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Josh.”

The thing that was once Josh Washington screeches again, and it takes everything Sam has not to turn tail and run right there and then. She stills, waits as he growls down to silence again, his head tilting from side to side as he studies her. “Josh,” she repeats. “We came back. It’s okay. We’re going to- to take care of you, alright? Everything is going to be okay.” She’s close enough to touch now, and she reaches out a hand, brings it to rest on the side of the Wendigo’s face. “Hey . . .” She’s shocked he hasn’t ripped her in two, she really is. She keeps waiting for it to happen, almost wants it to. She’d deserve it. But Josh, or the thing that used to be Josh, just looks at her, teeth bared but no more. 

A glint of metal over his shoulder alerts her to Mike’s shift in position, and Sam refocuses her attention on the Wendigo. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I thought I was helping, when we talked, I thought just me being there was enough. I knew that you were just telling me what I wanted to hear most days, but I thought as long as you knew someone was listening, you’d be okay. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough, Josh. I’m sorry I didn’t come back.” She catches the gleam of metal again, and moves her hand up the side of his face towards the top of his head and lets her other join it on the opposite side, holds him still. “I loved you, you know that, right?” She murmurs.

The cut is clean, and one minute she’s clutching something living, breathing, between her hands and the next she’s not, the Wendigo’s body falling limply to the side as what little light that was left in his eyes dies. She flings the head from herself with a strangled sob at the same time Mike drops the bloodied machete and pulls her up into his arms.

“Jesus, cheese and rice, Sam,” Mike gasps against her neck as they stumble away from the body. “Don’t ever do that again! I thought for sure he was going to-”

“He wouldn’t.”

“But he could have! Fuck,” he straightens up, smoothes her hair back and presses a lingering kiss to her temple. “If you scare me like that ever again, I fucking quit, I swear to god. I will take Wolfie and the stupid Mystery Machine and I will drive into the sunset and leave you stranded on the roadside.”

Sam stays in his grip, lets herself be held as she draws small, soothing circles into the space between Mike’s shoulder blades. “Wolfie would stay with me,” she says after a moment of silence. “He likes me better.”

Wolfie barks in agreement.

“Traitor,” Mike sniffs. He releases her then, and Sam watches with grim fascination as he leans over the body and plucks three buttons off the remains of the navy jumpsuit. When he rights himself again he takes Sam’s hand and wordlessly places one of them in it, and pockets the other two. “Let’s go home,” he says as Sam’s fingers curl around the little thing. “I’m in mood for crap diner food and sleeping under those god damn stick-on stars.”

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

They mail the third button to Chris. And Sam sees it two years later, melded into an earring on Chris’s right ear during an interview he gives on one of those late shows about his newest movie.

She twines hers and Mike’s into matching bracelets. She calls them fighting bracelets, a reminder of why they keep moving, keep scouring papers and taking down monsters. No one left behind, not ever again. Mike calls them friendship bracelets, and often insists that they clack them together after a successful kill. Sam really hates him sometimes. 

As always, she keeps track of the others as best she can.

Chris is easy, he’s on TV a lot these days, and she catches a glimpse of him on the screen at least once a week in the various diners and fast food places they stop in. She’s proud of him, and tells him so when she has time to reply to his emails.

Ashley is a small time novelist. She’s into that whole Young Adult Lit scene, and Sam totes around one of her better selling books with her for a couple weeks, the pages dog-eared and well worn by the time she finally gets around the finishing it. “Trash?” Mike asks when she tosses it into the back of the van one afternoon. 

“Like John Green and Stephanie Meyer had a child, and that child wrote a book,” Sam admits. “The kids these days eat that shit up though. In that regard, she’s not half bad. Maybe Chris can help her with the movie adaptation.”

They learn, through the magic of Facebook and word of mouth from Chris, that Jessica’s daughter is turning one soon, and they send an anonymous gift to her and Matt’s last known address. “Cute kid,” Sam says when she pulls up the pictures one night in the back of the van where they’re spread out across the top of the giant sleeping bag. 

Mike drums his fingers against her stomach and spares the screen of her tablet a glance, “Eh,” he shrugs, “I guess. But she looks more like Matt than Jess, so she’s going to be stupid tall. The guys will all be intimidated. What a shame.”

No one is quite sure where Emily is, she’s deleted and remade her social media accounts half a dozen times over the years, and doesn’t bother to keep in contact with anyone. Mike mentions, once over a cup of motel-brewed coffee that he thinks he saw her in the background of a commercial for some up and coming business recently, but he can’t say for sure if it was her. Again, that’s probably exactly what she wants. And Sam’s fine with that.

For the most part, she’s fine with almost everything. She’s fine with passing newspapers and laptops over Mike’s whipped cream smothered pancakes in the morning, comparing potential leads and arguing the ins and outs of each possible hunt. She likes the long stretches of road from the passenger seat, the view of trees and sky out the window she rests her head against whenever it isn’t open. She enjoys the drivers seat, and the off-key tunes Mike belts out when the radio gets signal, and likes it better when he makes up his own songs when it doesn’t. She relishes in the cold nights, the ones that make the fake stars glow the brightest, make Mike’s arms curl around her the tightest. She loves the sight of a flare lighting up the night sky after Mike’s made a kill, and the thrill of Wolfie’s bark that leads her back to them safe and sound.

“You know,” Mike says one night when they’re spread out across the hood of the car outside of what must be the last drive-in theater on earth, “I still hate this fucking van. Too bad you and the Mystery Machine seem to be a packaged deal.”

“Shut up. You love the van,” Sam yawns into his shoulder. “It’s got mad style and you know it.”

“Sure . . . I love _the van_.”

She pats a hand against his chest, just over the worst of his scars. “Yeah, yeah, me too.”

“Can I at least put flames on the sides or something?”

“No.”

**Author's Note:**

> I made a few minor changes to certain things based on how I think certain characters personalities and life goals might change after the game's end.
> 
> I let Chris pick up the reigns Josh left behind on the movie-making front. I never mention it in the fic itself, but a lot of the stuff he works on he builds off of memories of things Josh told him he wanted to make movies about.
> 
> As for Matt, let's be real, barely anyone goes off to the pro athlete thing after high school. I figure he's going to hunker down in his studies, be a little more realistic, and decides that after the ordeal on the mountain he wants to help people. Also yes, Matt/Jess because reasons. I don't know, shut up. It's fine.
> 
> With Wolfie, let's just assume he wandered down from the mountain at some point and found Mike again because BROS. 
> 
> I very purposefully left Sam and Mike's end relationship as ambiguous as possible. You can read into it whatever the hell you want. Technically, I see them as platonic life partners, but again, up to you how you want to read it. I've set this shit free into the world, its up to reader interpretation. Have at it.
> 
> Considering that I kind of shat this out over the course of a single day and did not go back and edit it in the slightest after one 8-10hr session of non stop writing, I'm probably going to go back and makes some edits, maybe even fix a few scenes up and make them more to my satisfaction. I'll mark any major edits in the top authors notes.


End file.
